Sources Of Shakespeare Quotes & Sayings

Being singer is different than being an actor, where you call up sources from your own experience that you can apply to whatever Shakespeare drama you're in. But an actor is pretending to be somebody, a singer isn't. And that's the difference. Singers today have to sing songs where there's very little emotion involved. That and the fact that they have to sing hit records from years gone by doesn't leave a lot of room for any kind of intelligent creativity. — Bob Dylan

Great floods have flown From simple sources. — William Shakespeare

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson. — Pico Iyer

It is no surprise that the only woman in antiquity who could be the subject of a full-length biography is Cleopatra. Yet, unlike Alexander, whom she rivals as the theme of romance and legend, Cleopatra is known to us through overwhelmingly hostile sources. The reward of the 'good' woman in Rome was likely to be praise in stereotyped phrases; in Athens she won oblivion. — Sarah B. Pomeroy

So holy writ in babes hath judgment shown When judges have been babes; great floods have flown From simple sources, and great seas have dried When miracles have by the greatest been denied. — William Shakespeare

Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare ... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare. — Victor Hugo

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.
All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale. — Lev Grossman

WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles — James Shapiro

They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare, producing eight volumes of devoted exposition revealing not only what Shakespeare knew but precisely how he knew it. — Bill Bryson